Enough’s Enough

New Orleans has always had a terrible crime problem. It’s gotten marginally better over the last five years, but all semblance of law and order has completely broken down now. The only people left in the city, give or take a few relief workers and toughing-it-out property owners, are the most ruthless of the predators and the weakest of prey.

This isn’t street crime any more. This is barbarism. Enough playing nice. Send in the troops, with orders to shoot looters on sight. This has to end. Today.

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This entry was posted on September 1, 2005 at 6:39 am and is filed under Pith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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The governor needs to get troops in there now. This is getting way out of hand.
I can’t fault people for taking bread, water, other food and neccesities in order to survive. However, TV’s other folks belongings that they had to leave behind is theft.
Looting nursing homes and trying to loot a children’s hospital is barabrism. It needs to be crushed.

Martial law should be declared and some of the helicopters diverted to dispatching troops into areas worst affected to establish order. That means shoot to kill any looters or other criminals. The longer they wait, the worst if gets.

Someone has been watching too much Fox News; hence this inane thread.
Yes, there is looting. Yes there are low life folks out there.
But shooting them? Make them stay in the Astrodome since it will be empty by the end of the week. They can loot eachother.
I am so tired of solutions based on shooting people. We are smarter than that…I hope.

It’s definitely time to impose strict martial law. This is a time not for whining or hand wringing about “being smarter than that.” The simple fact is the type of people doing this respond to force, and only force. It’s time for some Roman-era type order to be imposed.

New Orleans–my favorite city–has always been vicious and charming in equal measure.

We know people there who got out their gun just to go from their car to their house in a middle-class neighborhood–standard practice pre-Katrina.

And if these barbarians are willing to loot their own neighborhoods for jeans and TVs, and to shoot at their rescuers, what force of civiliation could possible be brought to bear on them when they’re in Houston?

I volunteer “Osamabladen” (ooh, clever) to go down to New Orleans and show how smart he is by reasoning with the looters and “making” them stay anywhere without using force. Send us a postcard when you’re done, ‘K?

There are also reports of rescue boats being held back because they were being shot at as well.

I thought that the neocons promised that we would be greeted with flowers if we sent troops in? Obviously these “looters” are just protecting their way of life. I think we should get our troops out, i don’t think its worth the life of a single soldier to clean up that mess.

I wonder if the “shoot on sight” crowd would be so quick on the trigger if this situation were occurring in the Hamptons or Beverly Hills?

I’m not one to automatically view everything through the racism filter, but this seems suspect to me. I’m having trouble reconciling the immediate call to arms with the fact that there are a lot of poor and/or blacks involved in the looting.

Also, how are the police, military, and any other self-appointed peacekeepers supposed to identify a “looter”? Someone carrying a bag? Pushing a shopping cart?

YOU spend several days without food, water, clothing, electricity, ability to communicate, etc., and see how desperate you become. In that position, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have too many qualms about raiding the local Wal-Mart.

“if this situation were occurring in the Hamptons or Beverly Hills?”
I suspect quite a large percentage of the country would donate ammunition . . .

In practical terms, the way to tell a looter from a survivor is to look at what their carrying. A case of bottled water is a survivor, a plasma tv is a looter.

Personally, I suspect that a day-one “shoot on site” order for looters would have left the city with a much lower crime rate today, meaning that those rescue forces would actually be able to move survivors out. At the moment, most of the reports are leaving me with the impression that it will take a military combat operation just to safely move food and fuel supplies in to the hospitals so they can continue to provide emergency services.

Ginpundit, just who do you suppose is being victimized by the thugs in New Orleans at this moment? WASPs?Also, it’s pretty obvious that somebody carrying a t.v. set, or 12 pairs of Nikes is not in survival mode. Weak black people are being set upon by predatory black people in New Orleans right now, and your feeling is that it would appear too racist to annihilate the predators.

“I’m not one to automatically view everything through the racism filter, but this seems suspect to me. I’m having trouble reconciling the immediate call to arms with the fact that there are a lot of poor and/or blacks involved in the looting”

And a lot of poor and/or blacks whose rescuers are getting shot at!

If you are so concerned about poor and/or blacks, then why do you suggest we should even think about going easy on those animals who are using force to prevent poor and/or blacks from being rescued? Shoot to kill is the only thing that will save the poor and/or blacks that need rescue.

And what immediate call to arms are you talking about? When it was just people liberating diapers and food and such, few people were talking about stopping them in any way, much less shooting them. But when they stole weapons, tried to break into a children’s hospital (!), and started shooting at helicopters and purposely disrupting the transfer of tens of thousands of people from a shelter with no working toilets, that’s a whole different story. The only way you could conclude that we shouldn’t stop that from going on by any means necessary is if you have no compassion whatsoever for the poor and/or black that are being victimized yet again with deliberate intention by these thugs.

Yes, I’d be just as quick to call for shoot-on-sight if it was Beverly Hills, and about ten times as fast if I was actually on the ground in one of these hellholes. It needs to stop, now, or there will be thousands of unnecessary dead because of it. Law and order isn’t a joke, it’s a prerequisite to civilization.

Remember the basis for natural law(when no civil law exists) is violence. There is no civil law and order down there now so violence is the only thing that will be understood in an expeditious enough manner to stop this now.

If you trust the military & police to be discriminating enough to use force against only those who deserve it, then you are far more confident in their judgment than I am.

If this is a martial law situation, you WILL see plenty of people indiscriminately killed.

And aside from being fuel for the usual media sensationalism, why is looting even being mentioned? What’s the relevance of someone stealing a TV when virtually the entire city is a loss?

I’m inclined to think that for a shop owner, someone stealing a pile of shoes registers pretty low on his/her priority scale, given the scope of things.

As for people who are actively interfering with rescue efforts, then yes, deal with them as needed. But don’t use looting (especially when it impacts nothing) as an excuse for violence. If you’re that anxious to play with guns, then go join the military. I hear there’s a war on.

“If you trust the military & police to be discriminating enough to use force against only those who deserve it, then you are far more confident in their judgment than I am.”

Well, until the Galactic Empire annexes us and uses their own crack police units with foolproof lie detectors, super-duper worldwide surveillance, and super-accurate laser guns, we’re stuck with fallible humans. Military and police at least have some training in this area.

“If this is a martial law situation, you WILL see plenty of people indiscriminately killed.”

And if order isn’t restored, you will see a hell of a lot more people die because supplies and evac vehicles can’t get to them. Not only that, the worst predators will tend to survive (by preying on everyone else), get evacuated, and infest other communities, where they’ll preferentially prey upon the poor the way that predators have been doing across the country for decades.

And if you really think it’s racist to insist that something needs to be done to correct that, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought.

Ginpundit, when this is over there undoubtedly will be widespread accounts of women and children sexually assulted, among other crimes. When you start letting thugs steal at will, for purposes other than survival, you go down the road to the law of the jungle, where the weak are consumed by the violently powerful. That is the process you are supporting, by advocating that insyffcient force be deployed to stop the thuggery.

There are probably thousands of people in NO who need food, water or medical attention immediately, and if they don’t get in a very short period of time they may die. Anybody who is firing at rescue workers are keeping those rescue workers from saving lives. They are therefore murderers, pure and simple, and the sooner they are out of the way the more innocent lives can be spared.

Same goes for the common looters. Although most of them aren’t carrying firearms and aren’t interfering with rescue workers, they are forcing police officers off of search and recover missions, thus endangering lives.